Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties Book by Carol Deppe

[William Schlegel]

I am currently in the process of rereading Carol Deppe's excellent book on vegetable breeding. It is titled Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties and subtitled The Gardener's and Farmer's Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving. Copyrighted in 2000. I would recommend reading this or a similar book if you haven't. If you have questions about the book, read it, have read it, or reread it feel free to add to this thread.

I own also the first edition titled Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: Popbeans, purple peas, and other innovations from the backyard garden.

Carol also has two other excellent books which very much read like further adventures of the first.

I got Carol's first edition of Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties used from a local used book store after the second edition came out and read it, probably around 2001. At the time, I was already engaged in some vegetable breeding trying to pull a blue strain out of painted mountain corn. I got the second edition probably as a gift from my wife around 2013. I read portions of the new content in the second edition around that time. It's possible I missed something new as well.

Even then it's been another 10 years! Time for a reread.

I've been noticing quite a bit of relevant information that I see differently now. The past seven years, Thanks to fatherhood in large part which has kept me in geographic proximity to my garden, have been the most continuously engaged I've been in plant breeding. I've also finished a second degree in science teaching in that time. Clear back in 2012 I took a plant genetics course. I'm contemplating taking a plant breeding course this winter or next spring when Jim Myers will be the instructor, but also wondering if I should just save my tuition money and read a textbook or two.

I just finished chapter 7.

Some insights so far:

Tim Peters tomato breeding methodology is featured a bit and gives some insight into how he produced his tomatoes which I am very happy to have to breed with. He used small pots extensively in a technique reminiscent of TGRC's accession maintenance protocols. You can grow a lot of tomato plants even in a one gallon pot. That helps with population sizes. Also Alan Kapuler and his extensive dehybridization of hybrids technique. Both tomato breeders who worked with modern hybrids and wild species tomatoes.

Our tomato breeding with exserted and SI tomato species shifts us from inbreeding crops to outbreeding. Carol recommends controlling the fathers on outbreeding crops to make faster progress.

Finally in Chapter 7 Carol mentions the use of polynomial equations. Back in 2001 or 2013 I wasn't great at math. Had to retake for my second degree and did much better. Thanks to changes to my brain over my first forty years and the invention of youtube and Khan academy. Paying more attention to the mathematics of plant breeding would probably serve me well.

I'm sure I'll have further insights as I progress through the book. Thus I've created the thread.

[Nicolas]

Finally in Chapter 7 Carol mentions the use of polynomial equations. Back in 2001 or 2013 I wasn't great at math. Had to retake for my second degree and did much better. Thanks to changes to my brain over my first forty years and the invention of youtube and Khan academy. Paying more attention to the mathematics of plant breeding would probably serve me well.

A little script i've made
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1ShEUyKkSrhGRADCw9ertgjF5OrfNTjSW?usp=sharing

[William Schlegel]

Page 102 Aberrent segregation. I tend to think domestic tomato x Solanum habrochaites might segregate in this manner. Might be the simplest explanation for the difficulties we've encountered during segregation.

[William Schlegel]

Carol talks in the book about the importance of wild pollinators on smaller organic farms and gardens vs. conventional. She experienced significant cross pollination events in beans and chick peas that were unexpected until she realized that pollinators are significantly more abundant where there is more interface with diverse plant communities.